Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Life aboard can be perfectly pleasant when it’s warm outside, but when the weather turns cold a number of unpleasant factors conspire to make most sailboats, power boats and houseboats uncomfortable. This article attacks the problem from three directions. First is an explanation of all the factors that make overwintering aboard a typical commercially built recreational boat rather unpleasant. Next, I describe how those intrepid souls who do overwinter aboard in northern climates cope with these factors. Last, I describe how all of these factors are carefully avoided in the design of QUIDNON, “a houseboat that sails.”

Our guest was Dmitry Orlov, author of Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit Our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency, and Freedom, published by New Society. He writes about the "technosphere," the world of technology that claims to make our lives simpler and more efficient, from microwaves to cell phones, from radios to satellite TV. He says that the technosophere (which he contrasts to the more natural "bisophere") has a mind of its own that seeks to homogenize Homo sapiens with an amoral focus on growth, control, "progress," and obedience and conformity. His solutions principally involve downsizing and simplifying, stepping outside oneself to break the control of technology in our lives.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Tiny houses are great, but there are a few problems. One is zoning: it’s hard to find places where you are allowed to put one, especially if it’s anywhere near the bigger cities where the good jobs are. Another is flooding: more and more places are subject to flooding everywhere. Yet another is various local regulations that restrict what and how you can build.

Sometimes a case looks weak because there is no “smoking gun”—no obvious, direct evidence of conspiracy, malfeasance or evil intent—but once you tally up all the evidence it forms a coherent and damning picture. And so it is with the Obama administration vis à vis Russia: by feigning hostile intent it did everything possible to further Russia’s agenda. And although it is always possible to claim that all of Obama’s failures stem from mere incompetence, at some point this claim begins to ring hollow; how can he possibly be so utterly competent… at being incompetent? Perhaps he just used incompetence as a veil to cover his true intent, which was always to bolster Russia while rendering the US maximally irrelevant in world affairs. Let’s examine Obama’s major foreign policy initiatives from this angle.

Friday, December 16, 2016

I’ve been experiencing some difficulties with commenting on the current political situation in the US, because it’s been a little too funny, whereas this is a very serious blog. But I have decided that I must try my best. Now, these are serious matters, so as you read this, please refrain from any and all levity and mirth.

You may have heard by now that the Russians stole the US presidential election; if it wasn’t for them, Hillary Clinton would have been president-elect, but because of their meddling we are now stuck with Donald Trump and his 1001 oligarchs running the federal government for the next four years.

There are two ways to approach this question. One is to take the accusation of Russian hacking of the US elections at face value, and we will certainly do that. But first let’s try another way, because it’s quicker. Let’s consider the accusation itself as a symptom of some unrelated disorder. This is often the best way forward. Suppose a person walks into a doctor’s office, and says, “Doctor, I believe I have schizophrenium poisoning.” Should the doctor summon the hazmat team, or check for schizophrenia first?

Thursday, December 15, 2016

When I first setting out to buy my current boat (forced to do so
because my family got larger and no longer fit aboard) I discussed the
various offerings available in the commercially-built sailboat world
with my friend Capt. Ray Jason. He asked me what I was looking for in a
sailboat, and among other things I listed “a sauna, and room for a
pony.” (I didn’t mention that I also want to be able to ride a bicycle
around the deck, or hang a hammock on deck while the boat was under way,
but I do.) And then the pony became a running joke between us. When I
complained that, for instance, it was hard to plot a reasonable,
traffic-free coastwise course that would allow me to sleep because there
were always radar contacts bleeping away at me, Ray would helpfully
suggest that I ask the pony to keep watch while I sleep. And so on.

But
now I am happy to report that we have finally succeeded in designing a
sailboat with “a sauna, and room for a pony”—and much else besides. Nor
is it a huge boat: it’s half a foot shorter than my current one. Nor did
I have to sacrifice much to achieve this effect: various tests, in
software simulation and using a physical scale model, have shown that it
will be just as fast and just as stable as my current boat. It will
also be reasonably cheap to build and to maintain.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Over the past week, Google's Blogger has been reporting an excessive number of visits to this blog coming from Russia. This data is not corroborated by other web traffic monitoring sources, including Revolver Maps or Google's own Google Analytics. Looking at the structure of the “Russian” traffic, it looks very much like random noise. What could this possibly be? “Evidence of Russian hacking,” anyone? Well, here it is, finally! Let's not forget, Google founder Sergei Brin is a Russian... And here we were thinking that “Russian hacking” is as real as “Iraqi WMDs”! Shame on us!

That's a line from the movie “The Hudsucker Proxy,” and it's a good one, because in a very obvious sense it is all for the kids. And I mean, all of it—all that's left after we adults get done trashing the planet and finally kick the bucket. Yes, a few people will insist that having children, given the state of the planet, is unconscionable (“What sort of world would we be bringing them into?”) but the rest of us will faithfully follow our genetic programming and procreate regardless of the condition the universe happens to be in.

This is not an opinion; it is a prediction—made decades ago, and still right on target.

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Carolyn and Dmitry discuss Piero San Giorgio's book Women On The Verge Of Societal Breakdown published by Club Orlov Press. Dmitry states that the book illustrates the crucial role which women need to play, as traditional keepers of home and hearth, to keep the family together and doing well during treacherous, turbulent times. But the book also recognizes the great difficulties women will face as the societies they depend on decay and fall apart, and the precariousness of the major gains women have made over the past century, which Piero rightly calls the Century of Women. While recent social progress has made women independent and men somewhat superfluous, these trends tend to quickly reverse as society begins to regress. Piero calls on men to start acting like men once again, and to once again become strong, reliable defenders of women and of their families.

One of the problems with Junk rigs is that they tend to twist: the upper panels end up sheeted in less tight than the lower ones. Since the direction of the wind is generally the same at every height (while its strength varies) what this means is that only part of the sail is able to perform at optimum efficiency; either the lower panels are pinching or the upper panels are luffing, or both.

Monday, December 05, 2016

[Update Dec. 5: Thank you to all of you who have already placed your orders. If you haven‘t yet, I will accept orders for another week exactly, then place the order with the publisher. I will stop accepting orders on December 12.]

My new book has finally been released and, as I have done with my previous books, I would like to give my faithful readers the opportunity to order numbered, autographed copies directly from me. The marina where we are docked for the winter has kindly agreed to store the boxes of books while I sign, package and ship them all out. Please use the order form below to order your copy.

...Mmm...

Please note: To make this operation doable, I have to impose certain limits: the mailing address has to be within the US, the books can only be ordered through PayPal (no PayPal account is needed, but you do need a credit/debit card), and I won't be able to accept returns or issue refunds. Also, I won't be able to manually edit shipping addresses: the books will be sent to the address that you provide through PayPal.

Friday, December 02, 2016

I finally found time to finish building the 1:12 model and outfitting it with sails and radio controls. Yesterday I sailed it around the marina, and I liked the results. It is fast and nimble on all points of sail, doesn’t leave a wake, and is very stiff. The shape of the bow provides for clean entry and little resistance. I didn’t notice any strange tendencies at all. Here is a video of QUIDNON sailing upwind in what for a 3-foot boat amounts to too much wind and quite a bit of chop, overcanvassed, with minimal heeling and good balance, and short-tacking successfully.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Some time ago I posted three T-shirt designs, with no explanation as to why. “Here are some shirts,” I wrote, “reasonably priced, in all styles and colors, free shipping on orders over 100 USD, yadda-yadda.” Just as I expected, a few people got it, and a few of those ordered some shirts. The rest had no idea; some even confessed to that in the comments.

Beyond attempting to mitigate against the erroneous notion, held by many of those who regularly read this blog, that high-quality web content grows on a magical content tree, and that therefore there is no need for them to pay for it, this new initiative is designed to solve a specific societal problem. Week after week hundreds of thousands of readers come to ClubOrlov and find out about some important aspect of reality, of which they would have remained unaware had they continued to just pay attention to mainstream media, to which some choose to refer as “presstitutes,” but I do not, out of respect for sex workers.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Those who took hard Hillary Clinton’s defeat and are now going through the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief are butts of a cruel joke, though played on them by an entity quite devoid of a sense of humor. The technosphere—an artificial machine-like sentient entity that wants to control everything including you and is busy destroying the biosphere and us with it—has taken pains to align their values with its own, to make them easier to control. It has no use for humans except as technocratic servants—engineers, scientists, technicians, bureaucrats, enforcers—and the best servant material is the lonely, atomized individual, snatched away from their family at a young age, their every interaction with other humans mediated by easy-to-monitor electronic communications systems, ideally a mental patient, chemically controlled, and too fragile to leave the man-made environment and venture out into the real world. On the other hand, autonomous, separatist, tribal groups are almost impossible for the technosphere to understand or to control.

If you think that such events are isolated incidents, think again: they are symptoms of a rampant psychiatric condition which is described in detail in Sean Kerrigan's excellent book Bureaucratic Insanity. They are by no means limited to annoyances such as a fine for feeding the birds; they also destroy families and ruin lives. Don't be victimized by insane bureaucracies! Read this book and learn some countermeasures.

My latest book, Shrinking the Technosphere, is currently being printed. And although I could, if I wanted to, write a new essay for today, I find this to be unnecessary, because there is a section in the book that specifically discusses what is happening today in the US: a federal distraction.

Monday, November 07, 2016

The 1:12 scale model is now complete except for the sails and the radio control componentry, which are in the works. The maiden voyage went uneventfully: QUIDNON sat quietly on its lines. The first and most important requirement for a boat, and especially a houseboat, is that it has to float really well. And it seems that this hurdle has been passed. More to come soon; in the meantime, feast your eyes.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

More fun in the Indispensable Nation: As we have all heard by now, according to Hillary, ardent of becoming National Basilisk, half of Trump’s supporters are evil and the other half losers, deplorables all. That is, she holds half of Americans in contempt. Unsurprisingly she said this in New York, which is barely America, and to a convention of sexual curiosities.

I frankly think her admirable. As she coughs, staggers, convulses, lies, pilfers, sells favors and lapses into intermittent confusion, she still has the courage to tell America that she loathes half of it. That´s candor.

Give her credit for consistency. She is always mendacious, firmly in the pockets of Wall Street, Israel, the Neocon hawks, and the arms industry, never having accomplished anything on her own, always riding Bill’s coattails, having a disastrous record as SecState, always for sale. With her, we know what we will get. With Trump, it’s a roll of very weird dice.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Six months ago, when my book Bureaucratic Insanity went to print, I couldn’t imagine how the social climate in this country could get any worse, and yet it has. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that large segments of our society are under intense psychological stress. That might be typical in an election year, but the sense of desperation is more profound than I can ever remember.

When individual identity and self-esteem are undermined, people become quick to anger. Society’s rules provide a kind of safe haven for approved behavior. Lashing out at innocent people, even children, becomes acceptable if it’s done in the name of “following the rules.”

Throughout Bureaucratic Insanity, I documented numerous examples where rule enforcers chose to act without mercy, to put people – often children – in their place. Nowhere is this more visible than in our rule-ridden school system, where students are cruelly punished for even the most minor offenses.

Monday, October 24, 2016

There is no question that technology has been key to humanity’s mastery and domination of the planet.

Thanks to these marvels of innovation, humans have transformed their natural surroundings to their service, leading to larger numbers of people, reliable and greater supplies of food, and the ability to extend lifespans.

There is of course the other edge of that sword.

Thanks to the powers they have harnessed, humanity is currently facing a multitude of interconnected dilemmas and problems stemming from population overshoot, climate change, and resource depletion. Thanks to human ingenuity applied on an industrial scale, human agencies threaten destructive wars and military interventions capable of destroying all life on the planet.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

It is tempting for us to think that our technological choices—whether we choose to live in a city, a suburb or out in the country; whether we want to drive a pick-up truck, a gasoline-electric hybrid or ride a bicycle; whether we take a train, drive long distances or fly—are determined by our tastes. We may flatter ourselves that we are in control, and that our choices are reflective of our enlightened, environmentally conscious values. This view rests on a foundation of circular reasoning: we behave in enlightened ways because we are enlightened, and we are enlightened because, to wit, we behave in enlightened ways. As to why what we consider enlightened is in fact enlightened rather than a question of possibly questionable personal taste—that is not to be discussed: de gustibus non est disputandum.

But there is an alternative viewpoint, which seems more realistic in many ways, because it rests on a foundation of physical, technical specifics rather than fickle and arbitrary consumer preference, whim or taste. From this viewpoint, our technology and associated lifestyle choices are dictated by the technical requirements of their underlying technologies, both physical (the operation of the energy industry, the transportation industry, etc.) and political (the operation of political machines that segregate society by net worth and income, relegating wage-earners to a global disenfranchised underclass).

Thursday, October 13, 2016

In spite of nature’s best efforts to derail my plans, in the form of Hurricane Matthew, they are proceeding apace, including the plan to design QUIDNON—the houseboat that sails. The hurricane provided a teachable moment on surviving hurricanes aboard boats, confirming many of my intuitions about what makes QUIDNON a safe design for any situation, hurricanes included.

We were in a mandatory evacuation zone, and although we could have sheltered in place, I decided to avoid subjecting my family to such an ordeal. And so we jumped in a rental car, drove away from the coast and sat out the hurricane in a motel room. When we got back, picking our way between piles of debris that were littering the roads, we found that the boat had suffered zero damage, but that the entire marina came within a foot or so of being annihilated: another foot of storm surge, and only some concrete pilings would have been left, with the rest of the marina, boats included, washed up on shore, with the boats crushed underneath the floating docks. In fact, this is what happened to many of the other marinas in the area. Since the height of the pilings was set a long time ago, when ocean levels weren’t rising as quickly and catastrophic storms were less frequent, this is going to be happening more and more frequently. Everyone here considers the fact that the marina survived something of a miracle.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Over the past week or so I’ve been receiving a steady stream of emails demanding to know whether an all-out nuclear war is about to erupt between the US and Russia. I’ve been watching the situation develop more or less carefully, and have been offering my opinion, briefly, one on one, to a few people’s great relief, and now I will attempt to spread the cheer far and wide. In short, on the one hand, all-out nuclear annihilation remains quite unlikely, barring an accident. But, on the other hand, such an accident is by no means impossible, because when it comes to US foreign policy “Oops!” seems to be the operative term.

One reason to be cheerful is that any plan to attack Russia is bound to become mired in bureaucracy. Battle plans are developed by mid-rank people within the US military establishment, approved and forwarded up the chain of command by higher-rank people and finally signed off on by the Pentagon’s top brass and their civilian political accomplices. The top brass and the politicians may be delusional, megalomaniacal and inadvertently suicidal, but the mid-rank people who develop the battle plans are rarely suicidal. If a particular plan has no conceivable chance of victory but is quite likely to lead to them and their families and friends becoming vaporized in a nuclear blast, they are unlikely to recommend it.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

I am very happy to announce the latest release from my diminutive but thriving publishing house, Club Orlov Press: the publication in English of Piero San Giorgio's international bestseller that addresses the problem of preparing to survive the spreading disorder and unrest specifically from the viewpoint of women. This remarkable book fills a major gap in the available literature on this subject, most of which is written by men and infused with a male-centric perspective. This gap is a major disservice to women and causes a major problem for men when they attempt to explain the nature of unfolding developments to their partner and to get her involved in preparing for them.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

My next book has cleared galley proof stage and is scheduled for release in November. Please add your email to the list in the right-hand column to be notified as soon as it comes out. Meanwhile, here is the video trailer.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Transcript of James H. Kunstler’s Podcast 280: Kunstler talks with Dmitry Orlov about Rob O’Grady’s book 150 Strong: A Pathway to a Different Future

Kunstler: Hello and welcome to the KunstlerCast. Thanks for listening in. If you'd like to support this podcast, you can become a patron of the show by making a small monthly contribution through my Patreon page. To do that, you can either search for me on Patreon.com or use the link in the upper right hand corner of my website, kunstler.com. My guest today is Dmitry Orlov, an old friend of the podcast. He's been here many times. He's the author of Reinventing Collapse and many other books. He's also become a publisher lately. One of the books that he's published we shall be talking about today, 150-Strong: A Pathway to a Different Future by Rob O'Grady. I'm a long-time fan of Dmitry Orlov. He brings a clear eyed worldview and mordant sense of humor to the rather confusing and confounding events of our time. Listen up now. There will be a quiz as we discuss 150-Strong by Rob O'Grady. Tell the listeners, if you would, why I'm interviewing you about it and not Rob O'Grady.

Orlov: Well, Rob has sort of indicated that he's perfectly comfortable with having me do interviews on his behalf and I'm happy to do it. I'm not only his publisher, I'm also his publicist. That's suits both of us fine.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

And here is a write-up that Rob O'Grady just sent in, responding to some questions Jim asked, which I didn't answer as fully as I should have during the podcast.

Self-organizing Systems – Reflections on 150 Strong: A Pathway to a Different Future

Nature is one great network of self-organizing systems. Always there is a tendency towards equilibrium. The antelopes that are slow and dull-witted are culled by the lions while the quick and sharp-witted ones survive to propagate the species. Bare rock erupted from volcanoes can become densely forested in less than a thousand years.

We might fret about climate change, but in a few million years the oceans and the organisms they contain will absorb the excess carbon we are venting into the atmosphere and plate tectonics will once again sequester it in the Earth’s crust.

There is beauty in these systems. They are efficient, and in this respect Nature, with its dynamic, constant rebalancing, serves as a model.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

“Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear.”

A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!

Monday, August 15, 2016

This day a year ago the world lost one of its great minds: Dr. Jaakko Hintikka passed away in Porvoo, Finland, aged 86.

I studied epistemic logic and philosophy of language with Dr. Hintikka while a graduate student at Boston University in the early 1990s. He was a very impressive intellectual figure—the author of dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of articles. But I understood his passion in life to be rather simple: it was to teach people to think—not what to think, but how to think. As a logician, he could see how helpless most people are at the mechanics of thought, and he wanted to help them.

Today, on the first anniversary of his passing, I am honoring Dr. Hintikka‘s memory with the following comedic horror story. Its plot rests on one of his insights: that public knowledge is but the tip of an iceberg of confidential, privately shared knowledge. It’s not what you know that matters, but who else knows that you know what you know.

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Here, for your pleasure, are three shirt designs. They are nautical-themed, highly ironic, somewhat politically incorrect, and they feature pictures of fish and exceptionally witty puns. They are very reasonably priced and are available in every imaginable style, size and color. Free shipping on large orders! Get them for yourself or the whole crew! Please click on the pictures to place your order.

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

In all my years of watching politics in the US, never have I seen a presidential election generate such overwhelmingly negative emotions. Everyone hates Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or, increasingly, both of them. This is creating a severe psychological problem for many people: they want to tell their friends and the world that Clinton is mentally unstable and a crook, but they are conflicted because they realize that by so doing they would be supporting Trump. Or they want to tell everyone what a vulgar, narcissistic, egotistical blowhard Trump is, but they are conflicted because they realize that by so doing they would be supporting Clinton. Some are abandoning the two-party duopoly in favor of minor parties, ready to vote for Jill Stein the Green or Gary Johnson the Libertarian, but are conflicted because voting for Stein would take votes away from Clinton the crook and thus support Trump the blowhard, while voting for Johnson would take votes away from Trump the blowhard and thus support Clinton the crook. There is just no winning! Or is there?

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

...It is dangerous to generalize, and there are some exceptionally handy women, but there is also a preponderance of anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of women who live aboard boats limit their participation in dealing with plumbing issues to making announcements and asking questions.

The announcements can be quite emphatic, ranging from “There is no water!” or “There is salt water coming out of the tap!” to “I am going to the gym, because I want to take a normal shower!” and “I can’t stand this any more!” The questions can be quite challenging as well: “Why is the plumbing breaking down all the time?”, “Why can’t it be made to work reliably?” and “Why can’t we live like normal people?” As you may rightly surmise, plumbing emergencies occupy a spot at the top of the list of things that negatively affect domestic tranquility among liveaboard couples.

When an onboard plumbing emergency arises, the male part of the seasteading team takes out the tools, plunges his hands into a cramped locker filled with a tangle of hoses, promptly cuts himself on a hose clamp and starts using foul language. He would much rather work on something—anything—else, but he knows that if he can’t fix the plumbing problem quickly and definitively, his stock will plummet in value. Now, fixing the problem is generally quite possible—plumbing isn’t exactly brain surgery—but there are several adverse factors:

A lot of words have already been said in the past few days about the Turkish coup that couldn’t fly, but strangely enough some rather obvious things went unmentioned, so I’ll try to fill in a few gaps. Specifically, a lot of the things that have been said range from feeble-minded to utterly preposterous. If this is propaganda, then it sounds like very bad, weak propaganda. Still, there is no shortage of people endlessly repeating these talking points, whether because they get paid to or because they don’t know better. They are the ones I want to address.

Saturday, July 09, 2016

Much of the design work has been completed over the past few months. The 3D model, drafted in Rhino 3D, is largely complete. Construction techniques, including materials selection, joinery techniques and order of assembly have been largely worked out. The cockpit design, the deck arches, the tiller linkage, tanks and lockers and many other details have been worked out in detail.

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

It turns out the processes of secularization and technological progress have raced ahead of civilization’s collective consciousness.

People were summoned to explore the heavens, they were promised universal prosperity, a world without borders, gender equality, and a third gender, and a fourth, and a fifth, and watermelons that taste like raccoons, and raccoons with the hair of mermaids. But people wanted a hug, warm tea, summers in the country, and to spend time with their relatives.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Given what’s happening right now with the EU redux, it’s hard not to write a little something about it, so I won’t even try to resist the temptation. Stock markets are crashing, banks are on the verge of failure, gold is spiking and City of London and Wall Street financial types are running around with their hair on fire. But beyond such financial superficialities, what is really happening is that class warfare is back with a vengeance, so far in the UK with the Brexit referendum, but likely to spread.

In that referendum, the older generations who know which class they belong to voted to fire their malign overlords in Brussels and London, while the younger generations, brainwashed by EU propaganda, did not. Some “experts” claimed that there is some sort of generational divide, but I think that older generations did a smart thing, and that this is adequately explained by the fact that they are smarter. You see, fools tend to die young, and the mere act of surviving is a sign of intelligence. But that’s just a minor side-point.

The main point is that the malign elites very much need to be fired, both in Europe and in the US. There are several problems with them, which I would like to briefly enumerate:

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Well, that didn't take long! Negative Interest Rate Policy appears to be a gift that keeps on giving.

Just a little while ago I wrote that, in essence, if the Federal Reserve wants to keep the financial party going a little bit longer, it will have to continue lowering interest rates to below zero, as this is the only way to keep broke debtors alive and prevent the gigantic debt bubble from imploding. And now we find out that the Federal Reserve has resolved any legal impediments (such as the Federal Reserve Act) that have kept it from doing just that.

To recap, negative interest rates are a way to pay debtors to hold onto their debt instead of defaulting on it or repudiating it, thus preventing the debt pyramid from pancaking and taking the entire financial system with it. But this effect is temporary, for at least two reasons.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The Law of Attraction is a staple of motivational speakers. The premise is that thoughts determine outcomes. If you can visualize a better future, and conceive of the steps you need to take to reach it, a potential future magically pops into existence.

In reality, change requires more than positive thinking. There is a feedback loop between thinking and acting. If we think differently, we must also act differently, and only by acting differently can we hope to achieve something new. In turn, new achievements lead to new experiences, which may cause us to think even more differently, revise our plan, try acting even more differently, and so on.

One of the issues we face in addressing massive, overwhelmingly complex problems such as, just to rattle off a few, climate change, economic inequality and social and political dysfunction, is that it is hard for us even to conceive of a better way of doing things. Not knowing what to do is bad enough; not knowing what to think is even worse!

[Update: So many people write to tell me how much they've enjoyed reading these two books, but there are no new reviews of them on Amazon! Yes, five stars is very good, but some more thoughtful reviews certainly wouldn't hurt these two wonderful authors. So, if you bought, read, and enjoyed these books, please post a review. Thank you.]

The reason I edit, typeset and publish books by promising new authors is that I want you to read them. And to do that you have to buy them. Someday soon these excerpts will stop, and then, unless you buy the books and read them, you will end up with half-baked thoughts in your heads. Enough said. Please click on the images below.

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Previously, I have written about the progression from positive interest rates to zero interest rates (since 2008) and finally to negative interest rates. And I asked my readers a simple question: How will negative interest rates blow up the financial system? And apparently none of you knew the answer. Now, I must confess that to start with I didn’t know the answer either, which is why I asked the question, and my first attempts at finding it were somewhat tentative. But now, having thought about it, I do seem to have found the answer, and it is that…

But first let us back up a bit and answer several preliminary questions:

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this:

If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States

will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.

Let us take a step back and put what is happening in a historical context. Russia has suffered a great deal at the hands of foreign invaders, losing 22 million people in World War II. Most of the dead were civilians, because the country was invaded, and the Russians have vowed to never let such a disaster happen again. Each time Russia had been invaded, she emerged victorious. In 1812 Nepoleon invaded Russia; in 1814 Russian cavalry rode into Paris. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed Kiev; On May 8, 1945, Soviet troops rolled into Berlin.

But times have changed since then. If Hitler were to attack Russia today, he would be dead 20 to 30 minutes later, his bunker reduced to glowing rubble by a strike from a Kalibr supersonic cruise missile launched from a small Russian navy ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea. The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

In this excerpt from his new book, Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness, Sean Kerrigan notes that institutional violence isn’t just limited to schools and offices. In their frantic search for meaning, many Americans have turned into bloodthirsty maniacs, pushing for more wars abroad and even nuclear war that would obliterate them.

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In one of his final HBO specials, Life is Worth Losing, comedian George Carlin explained that, in a sense, destruction gave him joy. He said:

I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.